Watching Black & White Movies/Shows

[Georgef551]

I don't know about you, but ever since I could remember, if I was watching a Black and White show, movie, or TV (We still had those things when I was a kid, mostly as secondary sets), I always, over a few minutes time, wind up mentally colorizing what I'm watching. Of course, it comes along faster if I know what the colors are, and I'm using a Black and White TV.
Do you perform mental colorization, or does everything stay grayscale?

[Cadgirl]

For me, it all depends on the movie/show. If things are not too interesting, then I will try to 'colorize' the picture I see. Otherwise, I love watching shows in black & white, if they were made that way. I have a few black & white movies myself.

[Ed]

Black and white movies are more visually appealing to me and usually draw me in more so than their counterparts. Out of my top 10 favorite movies, a large portion are in B&W.

[Technician]

Whatever form the media is in I'll watch it. I can't say I've mentally colorized a film. Though I could probably do a better job then Turner has.

[Georgef551]

It's something that "Just happens" when I watch anything B&W, without any thought or effort. If it's something I normally watch in color, and I'm using a B&W TV, the colorization happens within about 1 or 2 seconds, again, not conciously doing it, it just happens.

[Shaikoten]

I mostly watch Noir in black and white, so it's better just staying shadowy and devoid of color anyways.

[Butts]

I always imagine color, just based on shading. I don't know why, it's just automatic for me to do that.

[Bank]

A couple of years ago when I was still living out in the country, the only TV I had was an old black and white set with three channels that came in clearly. Even though I've been accustomed to color forever, at a certain point, I couldn't discern the difference between the black and white set and the color one. The very small differences in gradation on the black and white set would relay the actual color, so I would just see it as such.

Equally as interesting, people who grew up with a black and white television set are more likely to dream in black and white than in color.

[exp(x)]

Nice poll options, asshat.

[Enjay]

I personally really enjoy Laurel and Hardy movies. I've got loads on tape and DVD. I'm not sure that I colour them myself whilst watching them but they do seem more vibrant than might be suggested by mere greyscale. Perhaps I semi-colour them or perhaps the greyscale enhances things that are lost when there is a full range of colours present.

Once thing that I do find awful though are those ones where colour has been added by some sort of "colouring in" process. They just look awful IMO.

[wildweasel]

I actually tend to do the opposite: I'll mentally de-colorize whatever I'm watching, because I'm a noir nut. (I've played The 11th Hour in "Spooky" mode before, i.e. in black and white.)

[Super Jamie]

How on earth do you mentally "colorize" something?

For me, color is color, greyscale is greyscale.

[Georgef551]

Enjay said:

{SNIP}
Once thing that I do find awful though are those ones where colour has been added by some sort of "colouring in" process. They just look awful IMO.

I aggree. Looks like a color job was done on it: bland, and like a kid with a coloring book, see colors go outside the "lines". Too flat-looking.

Super Jamie said:

How on earth do you mentally "colorize" something?

Just by looking at the shades of gray, you figure out what colors closely matches said shades, and you pick one that makes the most sense. Skies and grass are the easiest, so you might siddenly think about the grass being green, and the sky being blue, and you mentally see it as such, even though it's grayscale.

Bank says it best.

[Aldaraia]

One film that I easily mentally colorize is Clerks, such a finely crafted film, you can tell its so ingeniously designed that by ten minutes in you forget that its black and white. When I look back on my memories on the flick, I usually never realize that its a monochrome film.

To sum it all up, black/white movies are almost like subtitled movies in a way, there's still this universal language that binds us all together, that you forget its even there. **

[Georgef551]

Amazing how movies are still shot B&W. I guess if the budget doesn't allow color.....whatever works and gets results, right?

[Enjay]

I don'r know about movies but taking B&W photographs (with actual film, not digital) usually works out more expensive than colour.

Lighting matching and so on is easier in B&W so a movie could well save a lot on post production if using B&W.

I believe that modern movies made in B&W are usually done for artistic reasons rather than budgetary considerations.

[kristus]

Yes, Making movies B&W these days are purely artistic license.

[Georgef551]

Although I read up on Clerks, they used B&W film because of their ultra-shoestring budget, although in regular photography, it is more artistic, and costly.
Could just use color film, and B&W developer. (If there's a such thing anymore.) Cheaper.

[printz]

When watching B&W movies, the first colour that comes to my mind is yellow. Making the film yellow/brown. Could be because brown is a comfortable colour, and yellow already appears in tons of Hollywood films.

So yes, I kinda colourize them, but mostly to yellow. Humans are yellowish, the sunlight is yellowish, dirt is yellowish, so it all fits. I think movies were yellow actually.

I'm not that close-minded to be unable to imagine B&W movies better than just B&W. Too bad that old movies are rarely interesting for me... And if some company bothered to paint colours over grayscale films, no matter how, they've done good jobs. Colour > Black & White.

[Georgef551]

I think colorizing the B&W classics wrecks them. The colors also look forced.
As for the brown/yellow, that's what some of the first films turned into over time. Maybe that's one reason you see those two colors as well.
Just a thought.

[GreyGhost]

printz said:

Too bad that old movies are rarely interesting for me... And if some company bothered to paint colours over grayscale films, no matter how, they've done good jobs. Colour > Black & White.

And slap a coat of sepia paint on Michelangelo's David as well - cultureless barbarians! :P

[Cadgirl]

No matter, how everyone sees these old movies is in their own way. It's interesting to hear how 'printz' colorizes them to yellow. I agree that those movies over time have turned to a yellowish color, cause of the age.

[fraggle]

Only peripherally related to recolouring discussion, but this is interesting.

[Technician]

This is fantastic news that the BBC can now use surviving black and white telerecordings that were transferred from the original D2's to restore the original color.

I hope that with time the original (surviving) film elements from the early Dr. Who years can be restored. Or uncovered for that matter.

[fraggle]

The technique only works for things that were recorded in colour and transferred to black and white film. One of the first things that was recovered using this technique was an episode of Planet of the Daleks that only existed in black and white form. The earlier (pre-Pertwee) episodes were all filmed in black and white, so it won't work there.

Interestingly, I remember seeing an explanation of another Pertwee episode that had been recovered to full colour using a different technique. Two copies of it existed: a decent quality black and white version and a poor quality colour version (I think it had been recorded by an amateur who recorded his TV screen with a video camera, or something similar). They combined the two recordings by using the low resolution copy to colour the high resolution copy.

The thing about the missing episodes is really sad. Every now and then an episode seems to turn up, but it seems like most of them will never be found. I bought the lost in time DVD set a while back, and it's tragic to see all these fragments of stories that (in all likelihood) no longer exist in their entirety.

[CODOR]

fraggle said:
Interestingly, I remember seeing an explanation of another Pertwee episode that had been recovered to full colour using a different technique. Two copies of it existed: a decent quality black and white version and a poor quality colour version (I think it had been recorded by an amateur who recorded his TV screen with a video camera, or something similar). They combined the two recordings by using the low resolution copy to colour the high resolution copy.

Some of the episodes used NTSC copies made for North American TV stations before the original tapes were wiped. (TVOntario was one, I know there were others.) The colour information was synchronized with copies of the B&W 16mm prints that were still around, so the result was much sharper than the NTSC copies alone.

Edit: more information on the process here

And speaking of mid-to-late 1960s British television, there's a colour clip of the Beatles performing/recording All You Need Is Love on the Beatles Anthology. Except this was filmed by the BBC several months before they went colour in late 1967 -- it was colourized based upon still photographs taken of the event. The effect is pretty convincing and I wouldn't have known about it unless I had been told otherwise. Probably the best colourized film I had seen up to that point...

[TheDigitalNomad]

Wow, that is incredible! Very interesting video.

[Sharessa]

fraggle said:

Only peripherally related to recolouring discussion, but this is interesting.

It's really sad that the BBC destroyed so many of it's old tapes even into the 70s, especially since there had been film preservation movements dating back to the 1930s. From what I heard, almost half of the Dr. Who episodes are still missing.

Speaking of Dr. Who, I really need to watch it sometime, but I have no idea of where to start.

[fraggle]

CODOR said:

Some of the episodes used NTSC copies made for North American TV stations before the original tapes were wiped. (TVOntario was one, I know there were others.) The colour information was synchronized with copies of the B&W 16mm prints that were still around, so the result was much sharper than the NTSC copies alone.

Edit: more information on the process here

Ah, ok. I must have got confused. I'm pretty sure that there are fragments of episodes that only exist as recordings of TV screens.

Danarchy said:

It's really sad that the BBC destroyed so many of it's old tapes even into the 70s, especially since there had been film preservation movements dating back to the 1930s. From what I heard, almost half of the Dr. Who episodes are still missing.

Well, it's nowhere near that much. Half the episodes from the first two doctors, perhaps.

[CODOR]

fraggle said:
Ah, ok. I must have got confused. I'm pretty sure that there are fragments of episodes that only exist as recordings of TV screens.

Yeah, I read a bit more into it: there are some segments that are only from fan's-camera-pointing-at-the-screen 8mm prints (see here and here).

I was also confusing two things: several Pertwee episodes had their luma taken from the 16mm prints and the chroma from NTSC fan-recorded videos, but not broadcast-quality copies held by North American broadcasters as I thought. I guess those were judged to be good enough to convert back to PAL in cases where the BBC had missing colour copies. A much better link (to the whole site) is here.

(And after all this I find I gotta get me some restored episodes on DVD...)